The Testimony of Christ’s Resurrection to the Truthfulness of His Previous Utterances.

One cannot speak to many audiences concerning the Resurrection of Christ without realizing that, before the message is finished, some will be asking, “Well, if it is true that Christ rose from the dead, what is the practical result of that historical event for us today?” I think there are at least four things which we should always remember that the Resurrection guarantees to us. The first is one which is rarely discussed in works dealing with this subject, namely the truthfulness, the dependability of all of Christ’s utterances. If our Lord said, frequently, with great definiteness and detail, that after He went up to Jerusalem He would be put to death, but on the third day He would rise again from the grave, and this prediction came to pass, then it has always seemed to me that everything else that our Lord ever said must also be true. If the words concerning His Resurrection were true, then when He said that His precious blood was to be shed for the remission of sins, that is true also. When He said that He came down from the Father above, that the words He spoke the Father had given Him, that He and the Father were one, that He was indeed the Son of God, He was speaking the truth. When our Lord said that whoever would believe on Him would have everlasting life, and whoever refused to believe on Him would be eternally condemned, He spoke the truth. That empty tomb, and the fact of the risen Lord, should assure us forever that when the Lord said He was going to prepare a place for us, that He would come again and receive us to Himself, and also that when the dead heard the voice of the Son of God, they would come forth from their graves, and that He will, Himself, be the Judge of all mankind, He was speaking the truth. There are many difficult things in the New Testament, there are many difficult and profound things in the Gospels, but whether we fully understand every phrase in the Gospels or not, and I am frank to say that I do not, I at least believe that what Christ said was true. We can never accept the Resurrection of Christ, and have any doubt about the truthfulness of any utterance that ever proceeded from His lips.

No doubt what we are about to say in this brief paragraph has already come into the minds of all my readers. If so many different theories have been proposed to rationalistically account for the faith of the early church in the Resurrection of our Lord, e.g., that it is all a fraud, that the body was stolen either by the disciples or by Joseph, or by somebody else, that after all the Lord was never in this tomb, or that He never died, or that the women went to the wrong tomb, the vision hypothesis, the telegram theory, and all the others proposed at different periods during the last nineteen centuries, by minds of different capacities, and different temperaments, winning followers for a time, and then being laid up on the shelf of the museum of Christological speculation, does not all this really show that no theory has ever been proposed that has been able to win the consent and approval of the great body of men who have predetermined in their own minds that there could not be such an event as the bodily Resurrection of Christ? If after 1.900 years of such theories and hypotheses, beginning with a lie the Sanhedrin concocted that first Easter morning, right down to the present, not one is accepted today as the conception generally held by those who deny the miraculous aspects of Christianity, are we not forced to conclude that no really satisfactory theory is going to be found, even with centuries more of denial, scheming, criticizing, and theorizing? The reason why no theory has ever been proposed, which meets the needs of an unprejudiced, rational person, is because the Lord did rise from the dead, and the evidence for His Resurrection is so overwhelming that by no honorable intellectual device can the evidence be set aside. I do not want to be sarcastic, or mention anything of a fantastical nature, but after looking at this problem myself for about thirty years, I have about come to believe that theories which attempt to explain away the faith of the early church in the bodily Resurrection of Christ are about as foolish as the theory held by a few strange persons in this world that the earth is flat. I do not know how you feel in the matter, but the author, now in middle life, with perhaps not more than a quarter of a century yet to live, cannot afford to take time to read a book attempting to set forth the foolish idea that the earth is flat, and does not see why any of us, after years of study, are under moral obligation to continue to read and study and ponder every new work that comes from a rationalist’s brain that refuses to give honest, full, deserved consideration to this stupendous miracle which has moved the world, established the church, destroyed paganism, quickened the lives of millions, and proved a light that no wind of infidelity has ever been able to extinguish.